Exploring and Building Open [Source] Software for Learning Ecosystems

Experience Design / Education / Multi-device / Grav CMS

This is a guide on how to setup your Grav Course Hub for a single course using the Admin Panel (accessed by adding ‘/admin’ to the Browser URL of your Grav site) or directly working with files. This guide assumes you have the Grav Course Hub up and running and that you are familiar with the basics of Grav.

If my reading of the tea leaves is correct, there could be a big uptake of the use of the Canvas LMS in Canada with news of a possible hosted in Canada cloud offering. As a sessional faculty member of the Computing Science Department at Simon Fraser University I’ve been using Canvas for the past several years and I thought it might be helpful for other potential users of Canvas to share my experiences so far.

I’ve been feverishly working in the open on the Fall 2016 Course Hub (built with my Grav Course Hub and using a flipped-LMS approach, naturally!) for SFUCMPT 363 so that potential students can better self-assess course fit before online registration starts on July 4th.

A significant change to the course this year is that students will research and design potential user experience improvements for an open source project of their choice. Also, the entire course outline is a structured as a series of questions, which will be examined, discussed and experienced as the course proceeds.

Based on some discussions with my fellow educators at the inspirational Festival of Learning in Burnaby, BC last week I’ve added experimental support for multiple courses (i.e. blogs) within one course hub. Don’t worry, the code behind the scenes is fully-tested - I am using the term ‘experimental’ to indicate I am still refining this approach and testing various use cases as I hear of them from other instructors.

With a single hub containing multiple courses you can now selectively not only share content/elements between different pages of one course, but also between one or more courses. And just like a single course hub, all course materials can be shared on GitHub/GitLab for collaborative editing.

Grav Skeleton Downloads

The upcoming Festival of Learning (June 6 – 9, 2016) is shaping up to be quite the event, with nearly 400 registrants at last count. I am really looking forward to attending, and will also be sharing lots of open source Grav goodness at both the Maker Faire and my Studio session ‘Moving Beyond the LMS with Grav’.